Complaints services

The Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) resolved more than 321,000 cases in the year to March 2017, up from just over 200,000 in 2011.

Is your company coming out on the right side of these decisions?

Fairer Finance has extensive knowledge of the Financial Ombudsman’s processes as well as the principles behind the FCA’s Treating Customers Fairly initiative. We use this expertise to perform root cause analyses and help banks and insurers stay on the right side of the FOS – resulting in higher customer trust, better publicity, and reduced outlay on the costs of dealing with the FOS.

What’s going wrong?

Companies are failing to adequately explain products and set customer expectations at the point of purchase, which is often the friction that leads to a complaint. Complaints teams, meanwhile, struggle to correctly interpret the Ombudsman’s “fair and reasonable” test.

Companies even lose cases where rejecting a complaint was fair and reasonable – because of poorly set out arguments, or a failure to calculate distress and inconvenience payments correctly.

Fairer Finance can help bank and insurance firms to better deal with complaints and ensure they have fewer cases upheld at FOS.

Root cause analysis on complaints

We offer a retrospective audit of recent contentious complaints, carrying out analysis to identify the root causes.

At the completion of the project, our team will feedback to the business as well as offering training sessions for frontline claims and complaints handling staff.

Live complaints review

We review current customer complaints and provide a report within 72 hours. The report will include:

Feedback on a likely FOS response if the complaint is escalated.

If we believe the complaint is valid, we will provide a recommendation on the size of compensation and distress and inconvenience payment.

If we believe the complaint is invalid, we will provide advice on thebest way of framing a response if the case is escalated to FOS.

Advice on risk of negative media coverage.

In addition, every six months we can:

Provide a report on trends, including recommendations for improvements.

Provide a training session for claims and complaints teams.

Working with Fairer Finance can lower absolute complaints numbers, as well as reduce the number of complaints which are overturned at FOS. In the medium term, this converts into financial savings for the business as well as better levels of customer trust.